Ezra Klein: March 7, 2010 - March 13, 2010

Today, I looked at the problems with the House demanding guarantees from the Senate, tried to figure out whether the public option is alive or dead, and interviewed Evan Bayh. Here's what I didn't get to: 1) Greg Koger looks...

Looks like liberal interest groups have gotten very serious about passing this bill, and they're letting Democratic congressmen know. "Hardball time," Greg Sargent calls it: In what seems intended as a shot across the bow of House Dems wavering on...

Earlier this year, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) announced his retirement from the Senate. It was a bit of a shock: Bayh had been twice considered for vice president, was frequently mentioned as a presidential candidate and looked likely to...

I'm a bit annoyed that Josh Marshall wrote this post suggesting that Democrats are looking a bit better in advance of the 2012 election. Annoyed because I've been toying with becoming an optimist on the matter myself. Josh focuses...

I'm continually annoyed by the punditocracy's tendency to judge the health-care bill in comparison to some ideal health-care bill (that doesn't have any votes in Congress) as opposed to the status quo. If health-care reform fails, the status quo is...

Or at least most House and Senate Democrats. The memo itself is from Joel Benenson, Barack Obama's pollster of choice, so as Jonathan Cohn notes, "you can consider this unofficial official word as it were." At the very least, it's...

Yesterday, Roll Call reported that the parliamentarian had ruled against Democrats who wanted to pass a package of reconciliation fixes to the health-care bill before the underlying legislation was signed into law. This in theory made it harder for...

The public option letter in the Senate has more than 40 signatories now. That would seem to push it well beyond the point of viability. But with Nancy Pelosi saying that the Senate doesn't have the votes and "it's not...

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the...

The latest issue of The New Yorker features a typically engrossing, and even convincing, George Packer article limning Barack Obama's failure to connect to Main Street. The only question is whether it's true. I compiled the chart above using...

Jonathan Bernstein doesn't think "dual tracking" -- letting senators filibuster without holding the floor and stopping all other Senate business -- much matters for the modern filibuster. His argument is here. My take on this is that dual tracking was...

Barack Obama plans to name Janet Yellen as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Paul Krugman is pleased. "She’s open-minded, a good counterweight to the inflation hawks who think that any day now we’ll be partying like it’s 1979," he...

A couple of readers have flagged this e-mail which is, as the kids say, going viral: Subject: PROPOSED: 28TH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION For too long we have been complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens have no...

I've been a bit annoyed by the convention of referring to the health-care bill's 10-year cost rather than its annual cost. We don't talk about very much in terms of 10-year costs, and so people don't have much context for...

Today I wrote about House and Senate mistrust, the political economy of killing health-care reform while letting the health-care industry grow, and the media's Massa problem. Here's what I didn't get to: 1) David Waldman makes a convincing case that...

Another reader disagrees with the Masked Grammarian. While I am sure the Masked Grammarians mean well, I must (speaking as a professional copy editor and certified word nerd, myself) take issue with their correction of your use of "impacted." Such...

Barry Friedman and Andrew Martin took to the New York Times yesterday to explain the key procedural change that turned the filibuster from a high-cost, final-stand maneuver to an everyday occurrence that was harder on the majority than the minority:...

"House Republicans Thursday announced their entire 178-member conference would not seek any congressional earmarks this year, denouncing all of the line-item expenditures as wasteful and corrupting," reports Paul Kane. The Washington Post home page gives this a good billing: "Republicans...

Like most bloggers, I'm not too fond of e-mails correcting my grammar. You try writing 15 posts a day without ever writing "then" when you meant "than." But insofar as such e-mails have to be sent, more of them should...

The thinkable has happened, and the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the president must sign the health-care reform bill before the House and Senate can act on a reconciliation package. In the Democrats' Senate Caucus meeting today, Kent Conrad apparently...

Harry Reid just sent Mitch McConnell a letter expressing his intention to move forward with reconciliation, and telling the Republicans to, well, read for yourself: Though we have tried to engage in a serious discussion, our efforts have been...

Blogging may be a bit slow this afternoon due to a couple of deadlines and interviews. I don't really know why I feel the need to warn you of this in advance. Your lives, I imagine, will not be much...

Matthew Yglesias on the coverage of Eric Massa: I really think that political journalists who’ve spent more than 20 minutes over the past 24 hours covering the Eric Massa story need to turn the TV off, turn the BlackBerry off,...

This won't be shocking to many of you, but the Congressional Budget Office just released an updated analysis for the Senate health-care bill, and it finds that it reduces the deficit, much as its predecessors did. The first 10 years...

That graph is from Pollster.com. It gets even tighter if you eliminate the conservative-leaning Rasmussen poll, whose founder wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday explaining that the president can't make health-care reform popular because voters believe all sorts...

This is a good Slate explainer looking into whether the health-care reforms of the early-20th century actually had a health-care system to reform. The answer, basically, is no, and for reasons I'll explain, that should make us very skeptical...

To put a finer point on why the House mistrusts the Senate, and mistrusts its leadership's ability to predict Senate behavior, consider the House's experience with cap-and-trade legislation. As Kate Sheppard explains, a lot of House members took a hard...

The biggest problem for the health-care reform bill right now is not Republican intransigence, troubling poll numbers, or even procedural constraints. It's the corrosive mistrust between House and Senate Democrats. This has mostly played out as farce, with Mitch...

I don't think "toughness" is a very good way to evaluate presidents; I do think a public option bill is a good idea; and I'm surprised to see Democratic Senate leadership going so hard against the filibuster. Here's what I...

"Quite frankly," Sen. Bernie Sanders said today, "we don't have the votes for single payer." That's not much of a surprise, but Sanders did outline another strategy for single payer that some liberals might want to think about. "Right now,"...

"The filibuster has been abused," Sen. Harry Reid said at a reporter's briefing this afternoon. "But next Congress, we are going to take a look at it. And we're going to make some changes in it.” Reid wasn't very clear...

This is a good idea: Congressman Alan Grayson, (D-Orlando), today introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States. The “Public Option Act,” also known as the “Medicare...

Forgot to post this week's Think Tank until now. So for those who didn't notice the update on the sidebar, here 'tis: (1) Three economists try to figure out how Ireland managed an economic crisis that mirrored America's without any...

Gerald Seib has a good column today complicating the question of whether Barack Obama is tough enough. But I'd as soon throw the whole question out. "Toughness" is not a useful adjective here. Some people who use the term...

Christina Romer takes a shot at those arguing signs of recovery are a signal to cut back on stimulus spending. "Immediate fiscal contraction would inevitably nip the nascent economic recovery in the bud -- just as fiscal and monetary contraction...

This is a good nugget tucked away in Peter Baker's profile of Rahm Emanuel: At an August meeting in the Oval Office with the six leading Senate negotiators, three from each party, Grassley asked Obama if he would say...

"I often tell my students that, in my humble opinion, one purpose of government is to help people be happy. The DC government did a good job on Wednesday." That's budget expert Donald Marron, commenting on DC's legalization of...

Most people probably don't know that Barack Obama has appointed Edward Tufte to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (the inspectors who watchdog the stimulus funds). And most people probably don't know that it's really, really cool that Obama has...

In an interview with The Atlantic's Derek Thompson, tax expert Roberton Williams advocates one of my favorite policies: Giving people the option of letting the IRS calculate their taxes automatically. The IRS knows everything they need to know for most...

When Rep. Paul Ryan sent his alternative budget proposal to the Congressional Budget Office to be scored, there was a bit of a caveat: The CBO doesn't estimate revenues. That's the job of the Joint Committee on Taxation (yes, Washington...

Today I looked at the cost controls in the health-care bill, the uselessness of counting votes and the prevalence of conservative misinformation on health-care reform. Here's what I didn't get to: 1. Timothy Noah thinks the insurance industry should like...

All the other bloggers got fancy invites to the fancy Treasury meet-and-greet yesterday. Not me. I'm pure and unsullied. And now I hate Timothy Geithner. But if you want to spend some time learning about the Treasury Department, the New...

Harvard economist (and former Obama campaign adviser) David Cutler runs through the 10 most promising cost control ideas of the past few decades and notes that six of them are fully included in the bill, three of them are at...

"I'll just tell you this," Rush Limbaugh says. "If this passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica." You hear that, guys? Health-care reform...

This is a nice list of potential nominees for the Federal Reserve board, but it's not necessarily an informative list. In part, you get the sense that people are simply tossing names out because there's no settled consensus on where...

A couple wags wondered how I could simultaneously say health-care reform is a big win for progressives while suggesting it's anything less than an unmitigated disaster for conservatives. It's because I don't think this is zero-sum -- at least philosophically....

I'm getting a lot of e-mails about this or that congressperson's latest hedge, or this or that effort to count the votes. So let me take a second to explain why I'm not posting those articles: I don't trust them....

I'm not sure whether Stephen Spruiell actually doesn't know how the health-care reform legislation works or is simply being purposefully obtuse in service of his argument, but either way, it's not comforting to see a post, this late in the...

One of the oddities of the health-care reform debate is that we tend to despise insurers for two contradictory things. On the one hand, we hate them for saying no. No to procedures, no to people, no to reimbursements. On...

Today I argued with my editorial board over the excise tax, defended the progressiveness of health-care reform, and remembered the shenanigans that accompanied Medicare Part D's passage. Oh, and Dylan Matthews explained Denmark's political system. Here's what I didn't get...

So long as we're talking history, I had an interesting chat this afternoon with political scientist Sarah Binder. Binder is a congressional expert who wrote a book on the filibuster, and I happened to ask her about the origination of...

Early on in American history, it was actually the House of Representatives that was bedeviled by a parliamentary maneuver that killed legislation by denying it a majority vote. Ron Brownstein's “The Second Civil War” (which is selling for a great...

Here are some things that happened on the night the GOP pushed the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit through the House of Representatives: A 15-minute vote was scheduled, and at the end of 15 minutes, the Democrats had won. The Republican...

As the dysfunctions of our political system have become a more prevalent theme on this blog, I've gotten a large number of requests for a series exploring the political systems of other countries. How England runs its health-care system is...

James Fallows, it turns out, is not a liar: The Amtrak Acela running between Washington and New York does indeed have wireless internet. And it's fast, and it's free (for the moment, anyway). It all felt very European. Incidentally, I'm...

To understand why the debate over health-care reform has become so toxic and nuts, I think it's important to understand how insane the commentary in the right-wing press has become. I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France but that...

Reading Chris Bowers's excellent list of the progressive priorities fulfilled or partially fulfilled by the health-care bill's sidecar amendments is a reminder of how peculiar the framing of this debate has been. There's no doubt that progressives have suffered...

From Jon Chait, who is very good with words: Today's Wall Street Journal editorial page has one of those sentences that make the Wall Street Journal editorial page such a daily delight: "Last week President Obama sanctioned 'reconciliation,' a complex...

One of the oddities of the conversation about the reconciliation process is that I'd bet most Americans would actually prefer reconciliation in theory. For one thing, the length of debate is limited, so the two parties don't wage war for...

Floyd Norris thinks the economy might have returned to "normalcy," and he has the charts to prove it. These final paragraphs, in fact, are the most optimistic sentences I've seen since 2008: In February, according to S.& P., 135 companies...

I've read it over a couple of times, and I'm not sure what the point of this Byron York post actually is. The argument appears to be that the House and Senate have previously resolved their legislative differences through...

The Oscar for Most Baffling Editorial went to my colleagues across the hall this weekend, for this effort on the excise tax. The point of the editorial was to lament that the excise tax kicks into gear in 2018...

Elizabeth Green's excellent article on the effort to identify what makes a good teacher "good" is the sort of thing you should print out and read over lunch. There are a lot of important points in the piece, but the...

This is the best chart summarizing the history of the reconciliation process. That would be true, I think, even if there were other charts summarizing the history of the reconciliation process. op-ed explaining the chart here....

I tried to watch the Oscars. I really did. But I got bored. I did catch Monique's win for best supporting actress, however, with its odd argument that her win showed the Oscars could rise above the politics. I found...

Ask a kid who just took civics how a bill becomes a law and she'll explain that Congress takes a vote and if a majority supports the bill, the bill goes to the president. That's what we teach in textbooks....